Straining Out a Gnat While Swallowing a Camel

Some people have an image of Jesus as this guy who was this kind of Victorian-era Christian male.  Always agreeing with the established order of his day, getting along with everybody in his life and never, never, rocking the boat.  This conception seems to be built on the reality that when faced with the Cross that He didn’t seek to escape torture and death when He clearly had the power to (John 18:6).  He was a lamb led to the slaughter (Isaiah 53:7) who didn’t answer the charges that His enemies had placed against Him (Matthew 27:14).

But Jesus didn’t resist these charges and allowed Himself to be killed because He was purposefully offering His life for the sins of mankind.  His death was a part of the plan, so to make a well-reasoned, nuanced defense of why He was innocent of certain crimes based on worldly constructions of what was or wasn’t “legal” wasn’t something that He was going to do.  

Yet this doesn’t mean that He wasn’t outspoken against His ideological enemies.  He regularly criticized those who resisted His ministry.  This largely revolved around the Pharisees, who were the established authority on religion in His day.

His critique of the Pharisees is multi-faceted and contains much in it that we should deeply consider.  The reality that the men most committed to the Lord rejected God as He stood before them in the flesh is something that should always bother us.  We need to learn from their failure that God does new things, that are often through different people and outside of what has become the established norm, and that may stretch those of us who have been loyal to Him our whole lives.  He will never do something that contradicts with His Word but there may be elements of the things that He does that go against our current understanding of Scripture and we need to be humble enough to re-evaluate our interpretations of the Bible whenever a new idea comes along that may (or may not) be a better way to understand what it teaches. 

But just because something is new doesn’t mean it’s good.  God is doing things in the world that will challenge us, yes, but so is satan (Matthew 13:37-39).  We need to have the courage to be willing to reject a popular idea that – after our honest evaluation – cannot be reconciled with Scripture.  Yet we also need to have the humility to consider if the new thing can be, and should it be able to be integrated with the Bible, then we need to be open to how God may be speaking through it.

Lord, give us the humility to seek to understand things that we may encounter in the future, the discernment to know if they are from You or not, and courage to either embrace or resist them based on what You have shown us.

Jesus Spoke Out Against Hypocrisy

Once we move past the harrowing fact that those most devoted to God rejected Him, we can still see that in criticizing the Pharisees that Jesus was speaking out against His ideological opponents.  Should they have been irreligious, He still would have spoken out against them to address their arguments.  He gave His life for the sins of mankind, but He wasn’t the passive, always agreeable, non-confrontational stereotype that typifies the popular understanding of what it means to be a Christian in the world today.

We see in Matthew 23 that His main critique of the Pharisees centered around their hypocrisy.  They professed a set of values that they didn’t hold to, and it made their arguments void.  Groups that hold power and influence over the ideas of a culture will always be susceptible to hypocrisy.  In fact, it’s really only those who have power who can say one thing and do another.  In doing this they are essentially saying “we are in charge” because it doesn’t matter whether what we say makes sense, what matters is that you have to go along with it.

On the other hand, logical consistency and coherence is generally the mark of those without power.  That’s because logic is built on something that both transcends the claims of governments and tech-tyrants and that is accessible to anybody willing to think deeply.  Logic is God’s gift to the weak.  It is foremost proof that all men were created in the Image of God, because we all have access to reason.  King and peasant, pauper and noble alike all can quiet themselves and think.  This makes us equal.

Science Has Lost its Way

Science at one time was the standard of logic, the signal fire of equality in the world.  But over time it has lost its way.  It used to be that a scientist would only state something as a fact that could be consistently reproduced by experiment without fail.  That such uniformity is even possible comes from the reality that we live in a logically coherent world – one of the biggest proofs for a Designer who framed the world in this way.

But now we see scientific institutions throwing away this value to align themselves with the popular movements of the day.  For example, Harvard’s Medical School has been quoted as saying “men can give birth”.

People who say things like this obviously feel empathy for those who struggle with gender dysphoria.  I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to struggle with a belief that you don’t belong in your body, and I wrote a whole post about how those with this trial can find love and comfort in God, and how they, through the kindness of our Creator, can come to peace with the bodies He gave us in my post titled Strangers and Exiles Seeking a Country of their Own. 

So, while I recognize that these science journals have made statements like this because they want to help the mental state of those with this trial, I deeply differ with the approach that removes the reality of gender distinctions in order to help such individuals.  Our bodies aren’t something that we should seek to escape from or reshape through gender reassignment surgery, rather the healthiest thing for us is to come to a place where we accept and even learn to love our bodies and allow them to shape how we live in this world.

But it is also important to note that prestigious science journals being willing to “change” the reality of gender is a significant break from who they claimed to be in the past.  Such journals used to represent “science”, which was a kind of word used to summarize a dispassionate approach to the natural world that only focused on facts that could be proven beyond any question whatsoever.

While “science” was never really what it posited itself to be and has always been filled with some degree of blind spots and wishful thinking, this break is so obvious in our day that it is redefining “science” as merely another tool of those in power to suppress those who resist their claims.  We see nowadays the scientific community somehow decides what is or isn’t truth and then decries anyone who questions their fiat takes on reality as “anti-science”.  The conversational, question-everything, don’t-believe-something-unless-you-can-prove-it old way of science is dead.  It has been replaced with people who put signs in their yard saying, “science is real”, which is really just a way of saying “you can’t question what we say”.  1984 is here.  It was just 40 years late.

We Live in Strange Times

But logic still persists and so does the cry of hypocrisy.  One of Jesus’ particular rebuffs of the Pharisees was that they strained out gnats while swallowing camels (Matthew 23:24).  What He meant in saying this was that they would apply logic to certain issues in an obsessive and unnecessary way but would let other things, bigger things, go completely.  A humorous modern-day equivalent would be the guy who is trying to lose weight who goes to a fast food restaurant and orders the super-size triple hamburger meal but makes sure to get the diet coke.   You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.

No where is this more evident than in our day where many people hold to this authoritarian view of science and believe with firm conviction that the earth is 6 billion years old but when asked if gender is real will state that they believe that gender is a social construct that we need to move away from.

Is this not a clearer indication of the strange times that we live in?  If science is anything it is based on the reality of our experiences.  That’s what experiments are – controlled experiences that seek to identify natural laws.  Our experience tells us that gender is real.  Men and women look different and can do different things.  For example, only women can have babies and they can only have babies after having sex with a man.  This has been true in every generation and in every place in the world.  For someone to deny that reality and yet still want to act as if science is a thing at all is very strange.  If gender is just a social construct, then so is science.  If gender isn’t real, then science isn’t real.

So, the camel has been swallowed.  But the parallel with Jesus’ saying kind of breaks down as we consider that radiometric dating, and really any attempt to map out the distant past, is based on assumptions that in and of themselves can’t be proven.  I go into these assumptions in my post titled I’m a Who Knows Earther and The Boomerang Effect where I talk about how we lack the tools in our day to indubitably know the distant past.  Empirical observation, which is what science is based on, is able to know the world as it is today, but because of the many possible variables that could or could not have been at play in the distant past, empiricism lacks the ability to perfectly discern the development and timeline of the natural world.

But at least in prior times scientists believed that what our eyes can see is a reliable guide to understanding the world as it is.  Now even that’s going away.

May the Lord raise up voices in the desert in the scientific community who won’t conform with what is popular and who will stand for truth in the midst of a world that seems more and more bent towards using power to compel the beliefs of people.